School of Architecture
Kensington Gore
London SW7 2EU
United Kingdom
Situated in the School of Architecture, the MA City Design deploys multi-scalar, strategic and urban spatial reasoning to address questions of social equity and transformation in our cities.
We understand that essential to understanding the opportunities and challenges of the global intensification of urban life and a general move toward the city and its inner urban core, is understanding the parallel question of ageing and labor, and its relationship to transformations in the traditional sites of intimacy and care.
The plasticity of human capital, its “employability” within new and emerging labor markets, depends on its capacity for both mobility, and for lifelong learning and adaptation. This demand extends the productive life span of human beings beyond concepts of retirement established in the 20th century, while pulling people out and away from traditional support structures such as community or family, those sites that have traditionally carried the responsibility of care, for the old and the very young.
Under pressure from these issues, and as the structures that have traditionally defined the city fracture in response to new disruptive technologies: public/private, home/city, City Design asks: what are the new spatial performances, the new and existing institutional forms, the new technologies, and the new governance mechanisms that together will enable us to find new forms of intimacy and care. In the interest of resilient and socially inclusive cities, what are the new spatial organisations that will for example support our old people against isolation and loneliness, ensure children belong in cities, that will allow all of us to find new ways of being together to achieve this.
Underpinning the work of City Design is explorative enquiry into new forms of technology, data and calculation, and new deliberative, multi-stakeholder and institutional development and delivery models. The programme is multi-disciplinary, both in terms of student, faculty and stakeholder participants and also in terms of content. It recognises that key to the work of change in the city is material, formal and spatial experimentation, central to which is the role of the drawing as a site of negotiation, disagreement and dispute amongst diverse stakeholders. We understand this to be a process not just reflective of existing interests, but constitutive of new communities of interest.
The MA City Design asks who are we together, and what is the city.
